Presentation

The goal of the research axis HELAN2 "History and ecology of language and languages" is to describe and explain the linguistic and non-linguistic mechanisms involved in the emergence and evolution of human language in general as well as of individual languages in particular. The approach taken is that of linguistic ecology, which studies human communication from a multidisciplinary perspective. The disciplines involved are historical linguistics with the comparative method and phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic reconstruction as well as language contact studies, on the one hand, and molecular anthropology, cultural anthropology, mathematical modelling and environmental science on the other. This interdisciplinary approach encourages the use of innovative methods in spatial modelling, linguistic classification and reconstruction, the study of population prehistory, as well as complexity science to investigate the role played by sociocultural and environmental factors in the evolution of languages and languages. The research of the axis is structured into two major themes: